Search

Interest in the field of career and technical education (CTE) has experienced a resurgence over the last decade, as the global economy has grown increasingly competitive while students have continued to leave school underprepared for well-paying twenty-first century jobs. Together and separately, the education and workforce sectors have sought to address these challenges and better prepare students for viable economic futures. The results have been many new, innovative programs at both the secondary and postsecondary education levels that seek to give students technical training for specific careers, general training to prepare them for the workplace, and work-based learning opportunities where they can develop connections to employers and the workforce. While there are still many under-researched areas in CTE, this paper attempts to capture the evidence that has emerged--identifying areas where there is more evidence as well as areas where gaps in evidence still exist. The studies that have been conducted on CTE have demonstrated that it shows promise, but it is imperative to continue building evidence, particularly where there is policy interest and momentum but little data. Doing so will help demonstrate how those programs and models serve students and ensure that the continued scaling up of CTE is supported by a rigorous evidence base. This paper begins with an overview of the issues in the education system and the labor market that have led to the current revival of CTE. It argues that the skills today's employers need are not the ones schools are providing. The paper continues with a description of how various policies have fostered the growth of CTE. In the next section, it provides details on the types of programs and institutions that offer CTE, and the evidence base to support each of them. The paper provides evidence on the effectiveness of CTE at different educational levels, and for specific subgroups, including students with disabilities, and by gender. Further, the paper provides an overview of the available evidence to support different kinds of programs offered at both secondary and postsecondary education levels, touching on the amount of evidence available in each area and the level of rigor used in the studies that generated that evidence. The paper concludes by suggesting that while CTE instruction at the secondary and postsecondary levels could bolster students' economic mobility by helping them gain postsecondary credentials and obtain higher-paying jobs, there are challenges involved in turning that promise into reality. Investments in evidence-based practices can give CTE programs a better chance at success.

Chetty et al. (2022) say county density of cross-class friendships (referred to here as "adult-bridging capital") has causal impacts on social mobility within the United States. We instead find that social mobility rates are a function of county density of family capital (higher marriage rates and two-person households), community capital (community organizations, religious congregations, and volunteering), and mean student achievement in grades 3-8. Our models use similar multiple regression equations and the same variables employed by Chetty et al. but also include state fixed effects, student achievement, and family, community, schoolbridging (cross-class high school friendships), and political (participation and institutional trust) capital. School-bridging capital is weakly correlated with mobility if adult-bridging is excluded from the model. R-squared barely changes when adult-bridging is incorporated into the model. When it is included, mobility continues to be significantly correlated with the achievement, family, and community variables but not with school-bridging and political ones. We infer that county mobility rates are largely shaped by parental presence, community life, and student achievement. To enhance mobility, public policy needs to enhance the lives of disadvantaged people at home, in school, and in communities, not just the social class of their friendships.

The paper presents a first global investigation of the longer-term inequality implications of COVID-19 by examining the effect of school closures on the ability of children from different countries and backgrounds to engage in continued learning throughout the pandemic, and their implications for intergenerational mobility in education. The analysis builds on the data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility, country-specific results of the learning loss simulation model using weekly school closure information from February 2020 to February 2022, and high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank during the pandemic to assess the incidence and quality of continued learning during periods of school closures across children from different backgrounds. Based on this information, the paper simulates counterfactual levels of educational attainment and corresponding absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility measures with and without COVID-19 impacts, to arrive at estimates of COVID-19 impacts. The simulations suggest that the extensive school closures and associated learning losses are likely to have a significant impact on both absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility in the absence of remedial measures. In upper-middle-income countries, the share of children with more years of education than their parents (absolute mobility) could decline by 8 percentage points, with the largest impacts observed in the Latin America region. Furthermore, unequal access to continued learning during school closures across children from households of different socioeconomic backgrounds (proxied by parental education levels) leads to a significant decline in relative educational mobility. [This report was prepared by the World Bank Poverty and Equity Global Practice & Education Global Practice.]

We use administrative panel data from seven states covering nearly 3 million students to document and explore variation in "academic mobility," a term we use to describe the extent to which students' ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their public schooling careers. On average, we show that student ranks are highly persistent during elementary and secondary education--that is, academic mobility is limited in U.S. schools as a whole. Still, there is non-negligible variation in the degree of upward mobility across some student subgroups as well as individual school districts. On average, districts that exhibit the greatest upward academic mobility serve more socioeconomically advantaged populations and have higher value-added to student achievement.

This paper provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link between educational inequality and social mobility. We interpret this evidence from the perspective of economic models of skill acquisition and investment in human capital. The models account for different channels underlying unequal education and highlight how endogenous responses in parents' and children's educational investments generate a close link between economic inequality and educational inequality. Given concerns over the extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also summarize early evidence on the impact of the pandemic on children's education and on possible long-run repercussions for educational inequality.

There is empirical evidence of substantial heterogeneity in economic mobility across geographic areas and the efficacy of schools has been suggested as an explanatory factor. Using administrative microdata from seven states covering nearly 3 million students, we explore the potential role of schools in promoting economic mobility by estimating cross-district variation in "academic mobility"--a term we use to describe the extent to which students' ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their schooling careers. We show that there exists considerable heterogeneity in academic mobility across school districts. However, after aggregating our district-level measures of academic mobility to the commuting-zone level and merging them with geographically matched external estimates of economic mobility, we find little scope for geographic differences in academic mobility to meaningfully account for differences in economic mobility.

I study the efficacy of test-based meritocracy in college admissions by evaluating the impact of a grade-based "top percent'' policy implemented by the University of California. Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) provided large admission advantages to the top four percent of 2001-2011 graduates from each California high school. I construct a novel longitudinal dataset linking the ELC era's 1.8 million UC applicants to educational and labor market outcomes. I first employ a regression discontinuity design to show that ELC led over 10 percent of barely-eligible applicants from low-opportunity high schools to enroll at selective UC campuses instead of less-selective public colleges and universities. Half of those participants were from underrepresented minority groups, and their average SAT scores were at the 12th percentile of their UC peers. Instrumental variable estimates show that ELC participants' more-selective university enrollment caused increases in five-year degree attainment by 30 percentage points and annual early-career wages by up to $25,000. I then analyze ELC's general equilibrium effects by estimating a structural model of university application, admission, and enrollment with an embedded top percent policy. I find that ELC and counterfactual expansions of ELC substantively increase disadvantaged students' net enrollment at selective public universities. Reduced-form and structural estimates show that ELC participants derived similar or greater value from more-selective university enrollment than their higher-testing peers. These findings suggest that access-oriented admission policies at selective universities can promote economic mobility without efficiency losses. [Additional funding for this research was provided by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.]

The purpose of this brief paper is to present initial findings from the recently collected London School of Economics and Political Science-Centre for Economic Performance (LSE-CEP) Social Mobility survey, which was undertaken as part of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) project 'Generation COVID and Social Mobility: Evidence and Policy'. These are the first results from a project that is producing a detailed assessment of COVID-19's impact on education and economic inequalities and offering an assessment for the longer term consequences for social mobility in the UK. Alongside the survey findings, the authors have also analysed economic and education outcomes of individuals in April 2020 in the Understanding Society (USoc) national household panel data. Before the pandemic, younger generations were already facing declining absolute social mobility and real wage decline (Elliot Major and Machin, 2018, 2020a). Education inequalities were also widening. Here new findings are presented on inequalities in the workplace and the classroom that have emerged following the pandemic.

Poor post-secondary education infrastructure and opportunities partly explain the low higher education rates in developing countries. This paper estimates the effect of a program that improved post-secondary education infrastructure by building many university campuses across Uruguay. Leveraging temporal and geographic variation in program implementation, we use a two-way fixed effect design and comprehensive administrative records to assess the program's causal impact. By lowering the distance to a university campus, the program successfully increased university enrollment, particularly of less privileged students who are the first in their families to attend a university. The program impacted students from localities up to 30 kilometers from the new campus, reducing spatial inequality. Importantly, this expansion did not lower university completion rates. Furthermore, the program increased high school attendance and completion rates and the proportion of educated workers in the affected localities. [Funding for this report was provided by CAF.]

Using 2016 Canadian Census data, this article examines the socioeconomic status of the second generation of immigrants, whose population has become increasingly diverse. The analysis focuses on group differences by visible minority status in two aspects relating to socioeconomic mobility: (1) intergenerational progress in educational attainment, which indicates the ability to achieve higher education regardless of parents' education, and (2) the relationship between education and labour market outcomes, which reveals the ability to convert educational qualifications into economic well-being. The results in general paint a very positive picture for the children of immigrants regarding the first aspect, while mixed results are evident for the second aspect. In particular, some visible minority groups are characterized by high educational attainment and high earnings, while some other groups experience low education mobility and low labour market returns to education. These results suggest that there are divergent paths of socioeconomic integration among the second generation.

The paper studies the impact of financial aid on long-term educational attainment and labor market outcomes in Colombia. In 2014, the government launched a large-scale and generous student loan program called "Ser Pilo Paga." It offered full tuition coverage to students admitted to one of 33 government-certified high-quality universities known for superior test scores, graduation rates, and per-student spending. Notably, completing a bachelor's degree converted the loan into a grant. To qualify, students must score in the top 10% of the standardized high school exit exam and have below-median household wealth. Using RD and DD methodologies, we use nationwide administrative microdata linking all high school test takers, postsecondary attendees, and formal workers to estimate impacts up to eight years after high school. Financial aid improves college enrollment, quality, and attainment, particularly in STEM-related fields. The earnings gains are substantial, growing, and driven partly by high-quality universities improving students' skills, as demonstrated by their performance on Colombia's college graduation exam. A welfare analysis using the MVPF yields over $4.8 per dollar of government spending. Lastly, the program narrowed socioeconomic gaps in college attainment, skill development, and earnings among academically similar students without adversely affecting non-recipients, thereby promoting equity and efficiency.

Historically Black colleges and universities are institutions that were established prior to 1964 with the principal mission of educating Black Americans. In this essay, we focus on two main issues. We start by examining how Black College students perform across HBCUs and non-HBCUs by looking at a relatively broad range of outcomes, including college and graduate school completion, job satisfaction, social mobility, civic engagement, and health. HBCUs punch significantly above their weight, especially considering their significant lack of resources. We then turn to the potential causes of these differences and provide a glimpse into the "secret sauce" of HBCUs. We conclude with potential implications for HBCU and non-HBCU policy.

Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the US but also in Finland which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45M Finnish individuals and their parents, we find that: (i) the positive association between parental income and off-spring probability of inventing is greatly reduced when controlling for parental education; (ii) instrumenting for the parents having a MSc-degree using distance to nearest university reveals a large causal effect of parental education on offspring probability of inventing; and (iii) the causal effect of parental education has been markedly weakened by the introduction in the early 1970s of a comprehensive schooling reform. [Funding for this report was provided by the ERC, the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, and FORTE.]

Positive social mobility benefits individuals in terms of personal advancement and the nation in terms of productivity. There are other social benefits aside. Education, including higher education, is widely understood to be a key contributor to social mobility. However, without a measure of universities' impact on social mobility it is difficult to assess their individual or combined contribution to this agenda and therefore to understand fully the value of university education to individuals, to the country and its taxpayers. The author sets out to identify a measure of universities' contributions to social mobility, combining the social distance travelled by graduates and the number of graduates transported. In this paper, Professor David Phoenix, the Vice-Chancellor of London South Bank University, proposes a new English Social Mobility Index (SMI). Incorporating the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and the distance they travel after they enter their higher education institution, the English SMI provides a new way of understanding the contribution of universities to social mobility. [Foreword written by Nick Hillman.]

Research has shown that there is a gap in educational achievement between socioeconomic and racial groups in the public education system in the United States. This paper identifies the link between resources and academic achievement. Through examining educational resources, from in-school factors, such as facilities and teacher quality, to out-of-school factors, such as family structure, socioeconomic status, and community values, this study serves to evaluate several theories of social capital in the hopes of providing an explanation for why this achievement gap exists. The review of the literature provided an inconsistent view on which factor has the most impact on educational achievement across diverse groups. In turn, this paper explores the possibility that the factors are interrelated and therefore difficult to compare. By outlining an analogy between Jared Diamond's (1999) geographic luck theory from "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and the public education system in the United States, this paper shows the importance of resources to academic achievement and how social capital plays a consequential role in students' performance in school.

We examine the impacts of being awarded a Cal Grant, among the most generous state merit aid programs. We exploit variation in eligibility rules using GPA and family income cutoffs that are ex ante unknown to applicants. Cal Grant eligibility increases degree completion by 2 to 5 percentage points in our reduced form estimates. Cal Grant also induces modest shifts in institution choice at the income discontinuity. At ages 28-32, Cal Grant receipt increases by three percentage points the likelihood of living in California at the income discontinuity, and raises earnings by four percentage points at the GPA discontinuity.

This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4-year institutions as for 2-year institutions. However, more than one-quarter of 2-year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4-year institution. In one application of these data, we find that the average strength of the labor market to which a college sends its graduates predicts college-specific intergenerational economic mobility. In a second application, we quantify the extent of "brain drain" across areas and illustrate the importance of considering migration patterns of college graduates when estimating the social return on public investment in higher education.

Most previous research on grammar schools has focused narrowly on eligibility for Free School Meals as a measure of disadvantage. But with 45% of pupils at grammar schools coming from families with below median incomes, a broader consideration of the impact of grammar schools on social mobility is necessary. The evidence suggests that grammar schools can increase the likelihood of progression to highly-selective higher education for pupils from some traditionally disadvantaged groups, including pupils in the most disadvantaged two quintiles of social disadvantage and pupils with Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds (BME). This report considers the impact of grammar schools on progression to higher education, considering various groups of pupils and focusing particularly on progression to highly-selective education and to Oxbridge. It considers both the chance of getting into a grammar school and the relative rates of progression, to compare the opportunities of pupils in selective and non-selective areas. It also assesses the impact of the new specialist Maths schools and explores attitudes to grammar school expansion across different socio-economic classes.

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link between educational inequality and social mobility. We interpret this evidence from the perspective of economic models of skill acquisition and investment in human capital. The models account for different channels underlying unequal education and highlight how endogenous responses in parents' and children's educational investments generate a close link between economic inequality and educational inequality. Given concerns over the extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also summarize early evidence on the impact of the pandemic on children's education and on possible long-run repercussions for educational inequality.

In 2012 the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government introduced a number of reforms to the higher education system in England. The main change was to abolish direct state subsidies for the teaching of most subjects, and replace them with a state-subsidised tuition fee of up to $9,000 (US $13,700). A number of other changes were also made, all with the aim of increasing institutional competition and consumer choice. The Government believes the reforms are necessary to assure financial sustainability, raise quality and enhance social mobility. This paper assesses the early impact of the reforms. It concludes that, on the evidence so far, none of the Governments declared objectives is likely to be met.

For-profit colleges and universities in the US have been growing at a staggering pace in enrollment, in profits, and in the corporate value of those traded on the New York Stock Exchange. From 2000 to 2010, the sector grew by some 235 percent in enrollment, increasing its market share from 3 to 9.1 percent of all tertiary enrolled students. What accounts for this rapid growth in the For-Profit (FP) sector in the US? How will such growth influence educational opportunity and degree attainment rates in a country that first pioneered a mass higher education built largely around expanding public colleges and universities? As discussed in the following essay, there are specific characteristics of the FP sector that are peculiar to the US; others reflect global trends largely seen in developing economies. Simply put, in the US as in other parts of the world, the FP sector is a modern feature of changing market dynamics related to demand and supply--or the lack thereof. As discussed in this essay, the current US experience is a version of what I call the "Brazilian Effect": when public higher education cannot keep pace with growing public demand for access and programs, governments often allow FP's to rush in and help fill the gap, becoming a much larger and sometimes dominant provider. This is the pattern in many developing economies such as Brazil where some 50 percent of student enrollment is in profit-like private institutions also found in Korea, Poland and many other parts of the world. Despite concerns about the economic model of For-Profits which rely heavily on taxpayer funds, their low degree completion rates, the quality of those degrees, their high tuition and fee levels, the high levels of debt and poor employment record of graduates, and new federal regulations and a series of lawsuits, my prediction is that the FP sector will continue to grow over the long-term not so much because it meets societal demands for diverse forms of higher education, but because of the inability of the public sector to return to the levels of public subsidies and program growth they had in the past--the Brazilian Effect. The result now, and in the future, is a kind of policy default: the future tertiary market will not be the result of a well thought out policy at the national or state levels, but a quasi-free market result that will foster lower quality providers and fail to meet national goals for increasing the educational attainment level of Americans. As this paper discusses, higher education policy is about broad issues of socioeconomic mobility and economic competitiveness, but it is also about money, big business, and political influence. (Contains 4 figures and 2 tables.)

Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from 4-year institutions cast ambiguity over 2-year colleges' contributions to upward mobility. This paper develops a new instrumental variables approach to identifying causal effects along multiple treatment margins, and applies it to linked education and earnings registries to disentangle the net impacts of 2-year college access into two competing causal margins: significant value-added for 2-year entrants who otherwise would not have attended college, but negative impacts on students diverted from immediate 4-year entry. [Additional funding for this report was provided by the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics and the Robert H. Topel Faculty Research Fund at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.]

This paper demonstrates multiple beneficial impacts of a program promoting intergenerational mobility for disadvantaged African-American children and their children. The program improves outcomes of the first-generation treatment group across the life cycle, which translates into better family environments for the second generation leading to positive intergenerational gains. There are long-lasting beneficial program effects on cognition through age 54, contradicting claims of fadeout that have dominated popular discussions of early childhood programs. Children of the first-generation treatment group have higher levels of education and employment, lower levels of criminal activity, and better health than children of the first-generation control group.

The recent Supreme Court decision NCAA vs Alston (June 2021) has heightened interest in the benefits and costs of participation in sports for student athletes. Anecdotes about the exploitation of student athletes were cited in the opinion. This paper uses panel data for two different cohorts that follow students from high school through college and into their post-school pursuits to examine the generality of these anecdotes. On average, student athletes' benefit- often substantially so--in terms of graduation, post-collegiate employment, and earnings. Benefits in terms of social mobility for disadvantaged and minority students are substantial, contrary to the anecdotes in play in the media and in the courts.

This study used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (comprised of three subsamples taken in 1979) to characterize the siblings of middle class and poor Blacks and Whites, testing for racial differences in the probability of having a sibling on the other side of the socioeconomic divide. In support of theories in the urban poverty literature about the social isolation of poor blacks, results found that African Americans were less likely than Whites to have siblings who crossed social lines in ways that were beneficial. Low-income African Americans were less likely to have a middle class sibling than were low-income Whites, and middle class African Americans were more likely than middle class Whites to have a low-income sibling. Therefore, low-income African Americans were less likely to have a sibling to turn to for help but more likely to have a sibling to turn to them for assistance if they were middle class. The study results suggest that racial differences in the composition of kin networks may indicate another dimension of racial stratification. (Contains 43 references.) (SM)

This study is part of a regional study in industrial South Wales on the determinants of participation and non-participation in post-compulsory education and training, with special reference to processes of change in the patterns of these determinants over time and to variations between geographical areas. The study combines contextual analysis of secondary data about education and training providers with a regional study of several generations of families in South Wales (a door-to-door survey of 1,104 representative householders), semi-structured interviews, and taped oral histories conducted in 1996-97. This study uses brief accounts from the interviews to examine the social determinants of adult participation and training as identified in earlier papers (Working Papers 7 and 9). The individuals' participation in adult learning is defined in this study within an empirically derived typology of learning trajectories. Treating these types as a dependent variable, the analysis identifies age, cohort, period, and location effects as well as considering their relationships to other variables such as respondent characteristics, personal and societal opportunities, and economic conditions. The study found that the most important determinants of participation in further education are time and place. The study concluded that ameliorating inequalities in society could make alternative learning trajectories available to more people, and it is worth doing, even if economic benefits do not accrue. (Contains 42 references.) (KC)

This paper studies how exclusive social groups shape upward mobility, and whether interactions between low- and high-status peers can integrate the top rungs of the economic and social ladder. Our setting is Harvard in the 1920s and 1930s, where new groups of students arriving on campus encountered a social system centered on exclusive old boys' clubs. We combine archival and Census records of students' college lives and long-run careers with a room-randomization design based on a scaled residential integration policy. We first show that high-status students from prestigious private high schools perform worse academically than other students, but are much more likely to join exclusive campus clubs. The club membership premium is large: members earn 32% more than other students, and are more likely to work in finance and join country clubs, both characteristic of the era's elite. The membership premium persists after conditioning on high school, legacy status, and even family. Random assignment to high-status peers raises the rates at which students join exclusive social groups on campus, but overall effects are driven entirely by large gains for private school students. In the long run, a shift from the 25th percentile of residential peer group status to the 75th percentile raises the rate at which private school students work in finance by 41% and their membership in adult social clubs by 26%. We conclude that social interactions among the educational elite mediate access to top positions in the economy and society, but may not provide a path to these positions for underrepresented groups. Differences in academic and career outcomes by high school type persist through at least the class of 1990, suggesting that this causal channel remains relevant at contemporary elite universities.

Our schools are environments of race and class and these school environments structure opportunity based on race and class. This paper explores how students' lives and their access to postsecondary education are framed and structured by the influences of race and class. The college choice decision process of three female Black students from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in three distinct high school environments are examined. One of the most important ways that schools foster the investment of various forms of capital in the course of students' educational careers is in the transition from high school to college. The data for this ethnographic study was collected over a nine-month period at three urban California high schools. At the private school, intensive support was provided for college admissions and students applied to selective colleges nationally. At the two public schools much less support was provided and applications were generally limited to within the state or to historically Black colleges. Analysis suggests that Black students from private schools are accruing higher social status and opportunities while the future status of Black public school students is lowered by their more limited college choices, regardless of their academic qualifications. (Contains 32 references.) (JLS)

This study is part of a regional study in industrial South Wales on the determinants of participation and non-participation in post-compulsory education and training, with special reference to processes of change in the patterns of these determinants over time and to variations between geographical areas. The study combines contextual analysis of secondary data about education and training providers with a regional study of several generations of families in South Wales (a door-to-door survey of 1,104 representative householders), semi-structured interviews, and taped oral histories conducted in 1996-97. This study begins by questioning the narrow definition of learning used in much present writing concerning lifelong learning, which tends to focus on the purported economic and societal benefits of prolonging and widening participation in formal education and training programs. In contrast, much valuable learning already goes on, and has always gone on, outside formal programs of instruction, both at work and at leisure. The study concludes that if such informal learning continues to be ignored by proponents of a learning society, as it has been by the authors of the recent green papers, for example, then the result will be an unnecessary exclusiveness in definitions of a learning society and an unjustifiable reliance on certification. (Contains 24 references.) (KC)

This study examined, over a 3-year period, the ability of financial assistance for minority students to bridge the gap between generic higher education and the high-prestige, high-cost institutions that are associated with long-term economic benefits to graduates. Applying a variation of the status attainment model to data for the 1989-1990 National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey and its 1992-1993 successor, equity of school choice was examined among various ethnic groups. Over the three year period, average family incomes for Blacks and Hispanics declined while White and Asian family incomes increased. All groups averaged higher amounts of student financial aid with the largest gains for Asians, then Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites. The existence of grants appeared to be encouraging particularly for Blacks and Hispanics, who "buy-up" in the college-price hierarchy. Loans had a lesser influence on college selection by price. Although, educational goals were the most important variable for all groups of the decision to attend a four-year versus two-year institution, financial aid made some difference in choice of institution Financial aid made more impact in 1993 than 1990, enabling all four groups to spend more on tuition. The analysis shows the importance of financial aid in widening a student's choice regarding both tuition spending and institutional level. (Contains 39 references.) (JLS)

This study is part of a regional study in industrial South Wales on the determinants of participation and non-participation in post-compulsory education and training, with special reference to processes of change in the patterns of these determinants over time and to variations between geographical areas. The study combines contextual analysis of secondary data about education and training providers with a regional study of several generations of families in South Wales (a door-to-door survey of 1,104 representative householders), semi-structured interviews, and taped oral histories conducted in 1996-97. This study examines the relationship between patterns of participation in education and training within families and considers the respondents' own explanations for the patterns observed. The analysis uses these three indicators of participation in lifelong learning: the highest lifetime qualification so far; the age of leaving full-time continuous education; and the individual's learning trajectory. The study found that the role of parental background in children's educational attainment and lifelong learning is much stronger than has been posited in other studies. The study found considerable reproduction of learning trajectories within families--strongest among lifelong learners and non-participants, and weakest among delayed and transitional learners. Although the role of family background decreases with age of children, the study suggests that families continue to play a key role in the transition from initial to postcompulsory education and beyond. (Contains 27 references.) (KC)

This study is part of a regional study in industrial South Wales on the determinants of participation and non-participation in post-compulsory education and training, with special reference to processes of change in the patterns of these determinants over time and to variations between geographical areas. The study combines contextual analysis of secondary data about education and training providers with a regional study of several generations of families in South Wales (a door-to-door survey of 1,104 representative householders), semi-structured interviews, and taped oral histories conducted in 1996-97. This study examined learning trajectories, defined in an earlier study, by area of residence, for non-participants by area and age, for delayed learners by area and age, for transitional learners by area and age, for lifetime learners by area and age-cohort, by place of birth, and by number of area moves. Ethnicity was also examined. The study found that traditional Christians of working-class families are more likely to be lifetime learners, as are middle-class families speaking Welsh and those who are more mobile, while fundamentalist Christians are less likely to engage in learning activities. Over time, the trend has been for all types of families to engage in more learning, including ethnic groups from other countries. (Contains 23 references.) (KC)

The deterioration of industries in rural America in the 1980s has placed rural youth in a difficult situation. Those who remain in rural areas face a scarcity of good jobs, while those who leave face competition for employment against better-educated metropolitan youth. A study was conducted to: (1) examine the educational experiences of both metro and nonmetro youth by their senior year in 1980; (2) analyze what had happened to these same seniors six years later in terms of education, income, and occupational status; and (3) determine the impact of migration on the senior class of 1980. Using the data file of the High School and Beyond survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, the study determined that metropolitan youth had several advantages over nonmetropolitan youth by their senior year in high school. The 1980 data show that metro seniors were more likely to (1) have well-educated parents; (2) have taken a curriculum that better prepared them for college; and (3) score higher on tests of cognitive skills. Follow-up data from 1986 show that metro seniors tended to: (1) continue formal education; (2) have higher incomes and earnings; and (3) be more likely to work in white-collar jobs than nonmetro seniors. The difference in occupational status was evident at nearly all levels of education. Rural youth have diminished opportunities which have often made a successful transition to adulthood more difficult. Data tables are included in the appendix. (ALL)

This paper estimates the causal effect of equalizing revenues across public school districts on students' intergenerational mobility, using variation from 13 school finance reforms passed in 20 US states between 1986 and 2004. Since households sort in response to each reform, post-reform revenues are endogenous to an extent that varies across states depending on the funding formula. I address this issue with a simulated-instruments approach, which uses newly collected data on states' funding formulas to simulate revenues in the absence of sorting. I find that equalization has a large effect on mobility, especially for low-income students. I provide suggestive evidence that this effect acts through a reduction in the gap in inputs (such as the number of teachers) and in college attendance between low-income and high-income districts.

We analyze in this paper the long term effect of a high school remedial education program, almost two decades after its implementation. We combine high school records with National Social Security administrative data to examine longer-term outcomes when students were in their early 30s. Our evidence suggest that treated students experienced a 10 percentage points increase in completed years of college schooling, an increase in annual earnings of 4 percentage points, an increase of 1.5 percentage points in months employed, and a significant increase in intergenerational income mobility. These gains are reflecting mainly improvement in outcomes of students from below median income families. Therefore, we conclude that remedial education program that targeted underachieving students in their last year of high school had gains that went much beyond the short term significant improvements in high school matriculation exams. A cost benefit analysis of the program suggests that the government will recover its cost within 7-8 years, implying a very high rate of return to this remedial education program.

High school vocational education has a controversial history in the United States, largely due to a perceived tradeoff between teaching readily deployable occupational skills versus shunting mostly disadvantaged students away from the educational and career flexibility afforded by general academic courses. We study the effects of a nationwide high school reform in Norway that aimed to move beyond this tradeoff. Reform 94, implemented in one step in the fall of 1994, integrated more general education into the vocational track, offered vocational students a pathway to college through a supplementary semester of academic courses, and sought to improve the quality of the vocational track through greater access to apprenticeships. We identify the impacts of the reform through a difference-in-discontinuity research design, comparing students born just before and after the reform's birthdate eligibility cutoff to students born around the same cutoff in placebo years. Linking multiple administrative registries covering the entire Norwegian population, we find that the reform substantially increased initial enrollment in the vocational track, but with different subsequent outcomes for different groups. More men complete the vocational track at the expense of academic diplomas, but this has no detectable impact on college-going and leads to reduced criminal activity and higher earnings in adulthood, especially among disadvantaged men. For disadvantaged women, the initial surge in vocational enrollment leads to fewer high school dropouts and more vocational degrees with the college-prep supplement, and hence an increase in the share of college-eligible women; however, this translates into only small and insignificant increases in college completion and adult earnings. We show that men overwhelmingly pursue vocational education in higher-paying skilled trade fields, while women almost exclusively pursue vocational education in lower-paying service-based fields, which helps in interpreting some of these results. Overall, the reform succeeded at improving social mobility, particularly among men, but it somewhat exacerbated the gender gap in adult earnings.

This paper analyzes the properties of the process of social and economic attainments in two contrasting situations: (1) when the process of attainment generates the distribution of attainments, and (2) when the structure of attainments is seen as exogenously determined. It is argued that the neoclassical economic theory of earnings determination corresponds to the first situation, while a model for the matching of persons to jobs (referred to as vacancy competition) corresponds to the second situation. In the neoclassical theory, change over time in a person's level of attainment is produced by changes in productive skills, while in the vacancy competition model change in attainment can only take place when a vacancy is created, irrespective of what other changes may take place in skill level. It is shown that the two mechanisms cannot be identified in cross-sectional data analysis, nor can they be identified in analysis of over-time change in attainment when time is used as a proxy for change in personal resources or job shifts. It is suggested that the most fruitful direction for research at the present time is one where different substantive implications of the two models are specified and tested. Since the two models describe how labor markets operate, future research should be directed at studying labor markets and their impact on the attainment process. (Author/AM)